Precision 5540 2 week review

Brand-new forum member here. I have my 5540 for 2 weeks now. I did not go for the OLED display, as they suck too much battery (dark mode is a nice hype, and might be ok for phones and TVs, but not for computer work) in my color/contrast combinations.

The machine is solidly build, nice enough keyboard (I switch just for the keyboard away from apple for my needs, the butterfly keyboard is sad). The 4K LCD is a very nice screen, easily on par with the best I have seen in the past. Heat is ok, fan noise is of course more than I am used to, but in a for me acceptable level. I went for the class 50 SSD, 64GB ram and the t2000 card, and have the machine most of the day docked to the WD19TB dock.

This is certainly the fastest laptop I have ever owned. In respect of the hardware, I am very happy.

The bad stuff is the software. It did not even took a week until the Dell Command utility to update your system started to have "you need to update something" loops. Got most of them sorted, beside the "Intel chipset driver", which is installing fine and is happy to do it over and over again. I went away from Windows 10 years ago, and man, that does not seem to get old.

Got 2 bluescreens in 2 weeks, for windows, that's from my recollection a pretty good deal as well. The only real problem left that I have is:

-> I have a thunderbolt raid array connected to the dock
-> putting the laptop to sleep does not effect the array
-> putting the laptop in hibernation makes the array go to sleep

Not really what I want to do, as I have not figured out how to start up a hibernated laptop without opening the lid....

Beside that I am happy with the purchase. Not with Dell though. The support, here in Europe, is a joke. I ordered an additional power supply, which was offered in the order process. When the delivery arrived, the wrong power supply was shipped, does not fit the laptop.

Service ticket 1: -> They can not help me, as I am living in Switzerland. Which is lame, as this was the Swiss support site I used, and heck it's the same site I used to buy the laptop.
Service ticket 2: -> they can not help me with returns, as I am above the 14 day (it was 8 days) time limit for returns

In both tickets the same guys responded, and for some reason believed I wanted to return the powersupply because I just did not like it. Where I wanted to return it, as it was the wrong one.

Now at the third ticket and my hope to get this resolved is not high. Seriously, considering I just spend 5K on a "professional workstation", the support feels cheap like if I bought a Chromebook for 200$. This, seriously, would have never ever happened with Apple, and makes me be afraid if I would ever have to use Dell for a real problem.

Current verdict: great hardware, should probably install Ubuntu, as Windows is still a bad OS with not really good drivers. Terrible after sales support, and I could not recommend Dell to a person who does need support.

Frank